Is there any authoring information of PDF?

How can I know what software is used in authoring, generating the result PDF document?

For example MS Word, latex/dvipdf, PDF Creator, etc. Can PDF hold such information?

Solution 1:

There are Producer and Creator fields in the PDF metadata, but they aren't required to be populated, or accurate.

Solution 2:

The legacy way to add "meta data" to a PDF file is using the "Document Information Dictionary". This includes the following fields: Title, Author, Subject, Keywords, Creator (like "Word" as the original creator), Producer (like "Acrobat" as the thing that converted it to PDF), CreationDate, ModDate.

Even though Info dictionary is widely supported the current best practice is to use XMP Metadata. Products like Explorer, Acrobat and Reader will transparently use XMP to populate Document Properties if it exists. XMP is widely supported by multiple vendors, far better defined (ISO standards for different domains: everything from digital photography to document archiving) and simple to subset (Creator is xmp:CreatorTool using XMP Basic schema and Producer is pdf:Producer using Adobe PDF schema).

Read more here in Technote 0003 about basic XMP Metadata in PDF.

Solution 3:

If you use Acrobat{,Reader} to view a PDF:

• right-click the page content on some page to open the context menu;
• select "Document Properties..." to select the dialog that displays that info;
• click the leftmost tab and see if you can find the info you're looking for.

A commandline utility that would display the same info in a cmd.exe window is pdfinfo.exe. pdfinfo.exe is available here: ftp://ftp.foolabs.com/pub/xpdf/xpdf-3.02pl4-win32.zip (just unzip to extract pdfinfo.exe, pdffonts.exe, pdfimages.exe and a few more files; no need to "install" -- they run from any location).

Here is an example usage:

C:\downloads> pdfinfo c:\pa\SHARE.pdf
 Title:          SHARE_Information_070808.indd
 Creator:        Adobe InDesign CS2 (4.0)
 Producer:       Adobe PDF Library 7.0
 CreationDate:   08/08/08 10:35:16
 ModDate:        08/08/08 10:35:34
 Tagged:         no
 Pages:          12
 Encrypted:      no
 Page size:      595.276 x 841.89 pts (A4)
 File size:      1474207 bytes
 Optimized:      no
 PDF version:    1.3

Solution 4:

There is also a great program called pdftk that will let you save the pdf metadata to a text file, or restore a pdf metadata from a text file.

It also does lots of other useful operations to pdf files, and it works on Windows and Linux. Current version is 2.01. Website is www.pdftk.com.

Here is how to save the pdf metadata to a text file:

pdftk A.pdf dump_data output data.txt

Here is how to restore a pdf metadata from a text file:

pdftk A.pdf update_info data.txt output B.pdf

This lets you modify the metadata at will, and introduce it again inside the pdf file. If you know the correct authoring info, but the pdf metadata has it wrong, you can correct it as you like.